The Incan View of the Night Sky:
Stars, Constellations, and Dark Clouds

People from around the world and throughout time have
looked up at the night sky and tried to find meaning in what they
saw. In the Northern hemisphere people saw bright stars, planets, and
constellations which they incorporated into their legends. In the
Southern Hemisphere, where the sky is completely different than it is
North of the Equator, people gazed not only at visible objects but
also at the spaces between them, finding not only star to star
constellations but "dark cloud" constellations as well. Although
discrepancies in naming stars and constellations often make it
difficult to determine how an ancient culture viewed the sky, the
problem is complicated in the Andes where a lack of information
combined with a "general disinclination to point to
anything considered
sacred; among other things, this includes mountains, stars and
rainbows," (Urton, At the
Crossroads... 95) make it extraordinarily
difficult to obtain accurate sky tales. However, despite these
difficulties, it is known that the Incas saw a variety of animals and
earthly creatures in the dark constellations of the Southern sky.
According to anthropologist Gary Urton, who "collected an unusually
complete set of dark cloud animal constellations from the rural
highland people of in the vicinity of Cuzco," (Krupp, 264)
"Symbolically, dark cloud constellations represent a transitional,
intermediate category of celestial phenomena. That is they are
androgynous or asexual, and even though they are located in the sky,
they are classified as
pachatierra (or
pachatira ), a word
which combines the Quechua and the Spanish terms for 'earth.'"
(Urton, At the
Crossroads... 109). The seasonal motion of
these constellations, such as Yutu (the Sky Tinamou - a
partridge-like bird), the celestial toad, and the Sky Llama, were
used by the Incas to track the passage of the seasons and to mark
sacred events. For example, "In ancient Peru, sacrifices of black and
multicolored llamas were scheduled for April and October, when the
'eyes of the llama' [alpha and beta Centauri] are opposite the sun"
(Krupp, 264).